SAP Launches Real-time Social Insights

Analytics are especially important in social enterprise applications. Most companies are trying to leverage almost every technology available in the market, but they still have no idea about what is effective and what is a waste of time. To that end, at the recently held CRM Evolution event, SAPlaunched its Social Contact Intelligence analytic application, which can be used to unlock information (real-time sentiment and contact insights) from a company’s social media channels as well as its and internal systems. Companies can then use this information to better target and influence prospects and customers in a variety of ways, such as to help identify and target the key influencers, generate new leads and opportunities, and improve overall service levels and customer loyalty.

SAP Social Contact Intelligence is part of the SAP Customer Engagement Intelligence solution, a set of applications powered by the SAP HANA platform designed to enable real-time insight from customer data, which allows for personalized and targeted initiatives that can help grow both revenue and profit for organizations. SAP Customer Engagement Intelligence can leverage text analysis and predictive engines within SAP HANA to bring the power of advanced natural language processing (NLP) and complex predictive algorithms directly to the sales, marketing, and service executives in a practical and user-friendly way without the need for data scientists and PhDs.

SAP Customer Engagements Intelligence Suite

SAP Customer Engagement Intelligence comprises four integrated offerings, the aforementioned SAP Social Contact Intelligence being one. SAP Audience Discovery and Targeting, which allows marketing managers to engage customers and help convert prospects by running advanced segmentations on large target populations and distilling insights into focused and personalized marketing campaigns, is another solution. The other two are SAP Customer Value Intelligence, which can give sales and marketing managers real-time customer insight into the true value of their customers, personalized recommendations for cross- and up-selling, and closed loop execution, and SAP Account Intelligence mobile app, which offers mobile sales teams real-time customer insights and personalized selling recommendations that should allow them to create target lists, increase the effectiveness of their sales visits, and seize sales opportunities from anywhere.

Sales, marketing, and customer service professionals struggle to access and analyze the large amounts of internal customer data stored in disparate systems within their organizations as well as external social media data beyond the reach of their IT systems. Often they must rely on outdated information, which can cause them to miss out on profitable cross- and up-sell opportunities, or incomplete information, which can lead them to rely only on gut instincts when making strategic decisions such as offering incentives to engage customers and prospects.

The dynamic nature of this project might be perfect for HANA and will be harder for traditional application-bound business intelligence (BI) tools that require multiple interfaces or mappings from apps to a big dedicated database/OLAP cube. HSE24, Europe’s leading home shopping retailer, is using the application and says that the solution has enabled its marketing teams to uncover hidden trends that help drive product returns and build high-precision marketing campaigns to influence customers’ return behavior.